Tag: Maryjun Takahashi

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Tetsu Maeda, 2021)

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A minor controversy erupted in Japan in 2019 when then finance minister Taso Aso issued a statement recommending that couples should have 20 million yen (£104,620 total at the time of writing) saved for their retirement on top of the state pension in order to live a comfortable life in old age. All things considered, 20 million yen actually sounds like quite a low sum for two people who might live another 30 years post-employment. Nevertheless, Atsuko (Yuki Amami) and her husband Akira (Yutaka Matsushige) are now in their mid-50s and don’t have anywhere near that amount in savings. They’re still paying off their mortgage and though their children are grown-up, neither of them seem to be completely independent financially and both still live at home. 

Tetsu Maeda’s familial comedy What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? (老後の資金がありません！, Rogo no shikin ga arimasen!) explores the plight of the sandwich generation which finds itself having to support elderly relatives while themselves approaching retirement and still needing to support their children who otherwise can’t move forward with their lives. Seeing an accusatory ad which seems to remind her personally that even 20 million yen isn’t really enough when you take into consideration the potential costs of medical treatment or a place in a retirement home, Atsuko has a sudden moment of panic over their precarious financial situation. The apparently sudden death of Akira’s 90-year-old father acts as a sharp wake up call especially as Akira’s apparently very wealthy but also selfish and materialistic sister Shizuko (Mayumi Wakamura) bamboozles him into paying for the entirety of the funeral while pointing out that they’ve been footing most of the bill for the parents’ upkeep over the last few years.

There was probably a better time to discuss the financial arrangements than with their father on his deathbed in the next room, but in any case Shizuko doesn’t pay attention to Atsuko’s attempt to point out they’ve been chipping in too. Akira’s mother Yoshino (Mitsuko Kusabue) also reminds them that their family was once of some standing and a lot of people will be attending the funeral so they need to make sure everything is done properly. The funeral arranger is very good at her job and quickly guilts Atsuko into spending large sums of money on pointless funeral pomp to avoid causing offence only to go to waste when hardly anyone comes because, as she later realises, all of the couple’s friends have already passed away, are bedridden, or too ill to travel. 

Yoshino is however in good health. When Shizuko suddenly demands even more money for her upkeep, Atsuko suggests Yoshino come live with them but it appears that she has very expensive tastes that don’t quite gel with their ordinary, lower-middle class lifestyle. Having lived a fairly privileged life and never needing to manage her finances, Yoshino has no idea of the relative value of money and is given to pointless extravagance that threatens to reduce Atsuko’s dwindling savings even more while in a moment of cosmic irony both she and Akira are let go from their jobs. Now they’re in middle age, finding new ones is almost impossible while their daughter suddenly drops the bombshell that she’s pregnant and is marrying her incredibly polite punk rocker boyfriend whose parents run a successful potsticker restaurant and are set on an elaborate wedding.

The film seems to suggest that Atsuko and Akira can’t really win. They aren’t extravagant people and it just wasn’t possible for them to have saved more than they did nor is it possible for them to save more in the future. Instead it seems to imply that what they should do is change their focus and the image they had of themselves in their old age. One of the new colleagues that Akira meets in a construction job has moved into a commune that’s part of the radical new housing solution invented by his old friend Tenma (Sho Aiwaka). Rather than building up a savings pot, the couple decide to reduce their expenses by moving into a share house and living as part of a community in which people can support each other by providing child care and growing their own veg. Yoshino too comes to an appreciation of the value of community and the new exciting life that she’s experienced since moving in with Atsuko. It may all seem a little too utopian, but there is something refreshing in the suggestion that what’s needed isn’t more money but simply a greater willingness to share, not only one’s physical resources but the emotional ones too in a society in which everyone is ready to help each other rather than competing to fill their own pots as quickly as possible. 

What Happened to Our Nest Egg!? screens as part of this year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- (翔んで埼玉 ～琵琶湖より愛をこめて～, Hideki Takeuchi, 2023)

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The Saitamafication of Japan continues in the long-awaited sequel to the hit 2019 comedy Fly Me to the Saitama. Though the visa system has been abolished and the citizens of Saitama are new free to enter the capital, that does not mean to say everyone is on the same page and the prefecture still faces internal divisions and increasing factionalism. Revolutionary Rei (Gackt) proposes a solution which involves connecting the series of train lines to make it easier to get around and building a beach resort to lesson their sense of inferiority over having no access to the sea.

Once again it has to be said that humour is very local and largely built around regional stereotypes, though it is perhaps curious that the ordinary citizens are often seen in clothing reminiscent of the 1930s something which is also echoed in scenes of trains arriving at stations greeted by crowds of well-wishers seeing soldiers off to war. This may in a sense echo the film’s central theme in the encroachment of Osaka imperialism in which Japan’s second city has launched a not so secret campaign to Osakify the rest of the nation, if not the world, using white powder manifesting as sand from Koshien Baseball Stadium which is a holy place to many as it is where the high school baseball championship takes place. 

They have a visa system in Osaka too, or more strictly the Kansai area, with Kyoto and Kobe apparently in on the plot and intent on looking down on suburban areas such as Wakayama and Shiga which is where Rei was planning on getting his sand. Shiga is set up as a the Saitama of the south west, a pleasant if dull sort of place with a lake its only claim to fame. Like Saitama it has a liberation front, led by Kikyo (Anne Watanabe) who known as the Oscar of Shiga because she went to France to study revolutions and is is dressed like Oscar from the Rose of Versailles. 

The citizens of Kyoto come in for a bit of a kicking for their stereotypically snobbish attitude, the natural politeness of the local dialect undone by a social gadget that reveals what they’re “really” thinking which is that their definition of Kyoite is very narrow. The stereotypical view of Osaka, as voiced towards the end of the film, is that the people are cheerful and warmhearted. The city is associated with comedy and particularly manzai double acts like the one which appears during the opening credits, which perhaps adds to the sense of despair and confusion that the normally nice Osakans could suddenly be hellbent on world domination aided by the already strong love for takoyaki throughout the nation.

As before, we also have a “real world” subplot in which members of a family listen to the radio broadcast outing the urban legend of Rei and his BL love story with Momomi, the Tokyo-raised governor of Saitama. These regional rivalries are tearing up the real world too with a tug of war match that threats to go incredibly wrong if the two areas with an existing beef are allowed to face each other in the final. In contrast, the fantasy world is a riot of zany 18th-century influenced design that sees Rei set off on a pirate ship to get his sand for the fake beach though the mayor of Kobe turns up dressed like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Kyoto-ite has Taisho-esque straw hat. When the gang are caught by the fascisitic Osakans they’re relegated to a dungeon under Koshien Stadium and enslaved because of Saitama’s low ranking amid the other prefectures of Japan.

It’s all very silly, and somewhat impenetrable to non-Japanese speakers who can’t pick up on the dialect switching or zany wordplay while a certain degree of familiarity with regional stereotypes is certainly helpful. In any case, while the Osakafication of Japan undoubtedly sounded quite bad, the same cannot be said for its Saitamaification and Rei’s desire to create a land without discrimination free of the oppression and inequality born of pointless regional snobbery where everyone is free to go wherever they please without let or hinderance. 

Fly Me To The Saitama -FROM BIWA LAKE WITH LOVE- screened as part of this year’s Nippon Connection

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Tag (リアル鬼ごっこ, Sion Sono, 2015)

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tag posterYou could say Sion Sono is back, though with six films released within a year it’s almost as if he just nipped out to make a cup of tea. At first look Tag (リアル鬼ごっこ, Riaru Onigokko) seems as if it might be towards the bottom of the pile – school girls running away from things for 90 minutes whilst contending with awkward gusts of wind, but this is Sion Sono after all and so there’s a whole world of craziness going on below the surface.

The action begins with a gaggle of school girls on a bus. Two of them start ribbing the girl on the opposite bank of seats, Mitsuko (Reina Triendl), because she’s always writing poetry. The pen gets knocked out of her hand and as she bends down to pick it up she notices a white feather stuck to the clip. Gazing at the improbable symbol, Mitsuko becomes the only survivor when a sudden gust of wind blows the top off the bus taking all of the other passengers’ heads with it. Mitsuko starts running, re-encountering the dreaded wind monster over and over again before stopping at a stream to wash the blood off her face and change into the cleaner set of clothes she finds abandoned there.

After this she finds herself ending up at an entirely different school where everyone seems to know her. Has she gone mad, had a psychotic break? If not then then she’s about to as an attempt to ditch class with some of the other girls results in yet another freak school girl apocalypse.

Running again, Mitsuko ends up at a police box where another woman seems to know her but insists her name’s Keiko (Mariko Shinoda). Oh, and it’s her wedding day today! That’s not even the last time that’s going to happen and it’s far from the weirdest thing that’s going to happen to Mitsuko today. As a friend of Mitsuko 2’s reminds us, “Life is surreal, don’t let it get to you”.

Answers come, after a fashion. Though Tag is nominally based on a novel by Yusuke Yamada (previously adapted into a long running film series), Sono apparently did not even read the book and has only taken its theme – everyone with the same surname being hunted down and exterminated, and repurposed it for his own ends. This time rather than a common surname, it’s an entire gender that is forced to live under constant threat as the plaything of a far off entity that is as invisible and ever present as the wind. It’s no accident that everyone we meet up until the half way point is female, and that the first (presumed) male we meet is wearing a giant pig’s head. Mitsuko and her cohorts have in fact been used as a literal toy by the men on the other side of the curtain. Their very DNA has been co-opted for the “entertainment” of the male world without their consent or even knowledge, and even if she had known, Mitsuko is powerless to resist.

The solution that is found is both very old and very profound. It’s far from an original ending to this kind of story though in these hands, and used in this way, it can, and has, caused offence. Tag wants to ask you about life, about death, about agency and misogyny – but it wants to ask you all those things whilst watching school girls get ripped apart by the same wind that keeps blowing their skirts up. Sono has his cake and eats it too. There will undoubtedly be those that feel that far from satirising mainstream attitudes to women, Sono has, in fact, indulged in the worst parts of them.

If all of that was sounding a little heavy, Tag runs (literally) at breakneck speed with barely any time for conscious thought between the first bizarre case of gore filled mass murder and the next. It’s also strangely beautiful with a hazy, dreamlike veneer full of repeated images and scenes of idyllic serenity. Is any of this real? Who could really say. The ultramodern, indie score also strikes a slightly hypnotic note lending to the feeling of freewheeling weightlessness.

In many ways, Tag has much more in common with early Sono hit Suicide Club thanks to a general thematic sensibility than to any of his more straightforward work since. That said, Tag never quite resolves itself in a wholly satisfying way and though its final moments are filled with a poetic sensitivity, there’s a certain barrier created by its ambiguity that feels unfinished rather than deliberate. Another predictably “not what it looks like” effort from Sono, Tag may just come to be remembered as his most considered effort of 2015.

First Published on UK Anime Network in November 2015.

Playing at the Leeds International Film Festival on 18th November 2015.

Other movies playing at Leeds include Assassination Classroom, Happy Hour, Our Little Sister and Love & Peace.

Can’t find a subtitled trailer for some reason but to be honest you’ll get the gist of it: